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AOL to Turn Netscape Site Into a Newspaper of Sorts

In attempt to revive an aging but still well-known Internet brand, AOL is turning its Netscape.com site into a collection of links to news articles, submitted by users and expanded upon by a staff of bloggers.

AOL, part of Time Warner, has been trying to move away from its rapidly declining Internet access business by building a series of advertising-supported Web sites. Netscape.com, a broad Web portal, already has an audience, but it has been shrinking, in part because of the fading popularity of the Netscape browser, which sent users to the site by default. The site had 11.4 million users in May, down from 15.4 million a year earlier.

AOL's plan to keep and expand that audience was devised by Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs Inc., a collection of blogs that AOL bought last year. Mr. Calacanis proposed that Netscape could combine blogging with the growing popularity of sites that allowed people to share interesting things they found on the Internet with others.

Jonathan Miller, AOL's chief executive, agreed.

"We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better," Mr. Miller said.

The site is modeled on Digg (www.digg.com), a rapidly growing site focused on technology news. Digg users find items that interest them on news sites, blogs or anywhere else on the Web. They submit links to those items along with short descriptions. Other users then vote on the items, and those that generate the most interest are displayed on the site's home page, without the intervention of editors.

Digg has grown to 8 million users a month from 30,000 over the last year, according to Jay Adelson, the chief executive of Digg. Next week, Digg will introduce a redesign that will allow it to cover a broader range of topics, including world affairs and business, Mr. Adelson said.

The new Netscape site, which is scheduled to be introduced in a preview version today, will also invite users to nominate and vote on articles. And it will have 30 categories, including technology, politics, music, science, religion and one called "Do no evil," which will deal with stories about heroes and villains.

Where Netscape goes beyond Digg is that its staff of eight full-time bloggers, called anchors, will add original material to the accounts that are of most interest to the audience. In some cases they will post commentary, but often they will gather additional facts or conduct interviews.

Photo

The Netscape newsroom. Jason Calacanis, an architect of change at AOL, sits just right of the Netscape logo.Credit
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

For example, during the internal testing of the site, a restaurant review was popular, so a blogger called the chef to get a reaction to the review.

"The goal is to keep the conversation going," Mr. Calacanis said. He called the approach "meta-journalism."

"We are not trying to write a 1,000-word piece," Mr. Calacanis said. "When someone has written the 1,000-word piece, we will write the 100-word update."

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, praised the attempt to combine user participation and original content.

"There is a lot of potential in using the wisdom of the crowd to point journalists in productive directions," Mr. Rosen said. "Whether it works in practice is a whole other question."

Mr. Calacanis has set aside a budget to pay for the Netscape bloggers to travel to news events, often with video crews. He said he hoped that the audience participation would allow Netscape.com to be quick to respond to news events. The bloggers will work on a schedule so that someone is on duty around the clock.

"Not only will we get the story first, we will have the resources to go after it," he said.

At AOL, Mr. Calacanis thinks of himself as a renegade. His own blog (www.calacanis.com) is frequently critical of AOL's bureaucracy and products. And he boasted that he had built the new Netscape outside the usual AOL procedures. Much of the work was done in a weeklong "code jam" when he assembled a dozen programmers in a suite at a luxury hotel overlooking the beach in Santa Monica, Calif.

"We have a smaller, quicker, lighter organization inside a bigger organization," he said.

Nurturing internal renegades has become something of a trend at Internet companies as they try to compete both with start-ups and the unpredictable colossus Google. Notably, Yahoo has acquired a series of Web sites related to online sharing, including Flickr, del.icio.us and Upcoming, and has tried to keep their management teams and cultures intact in order to push for rapid innovation.

Mr. Miller said he hoped that Mr. Calacanis could play a similar role at AOL.

"If you look at what is interesting on the Internet, most of the really innovative stuff is done by small groups that follow their instincts," Mr. Miller said. "What AOL needs to do is take greater risks."

AOL took control of Netscape.com when it bought the maker of the Netscape browser in 1998. It still sells low-cost dial-up Internet access under the Netscape name.

A version of this article appears in print on , on page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: AOL to Turn Netscape Site Into a Newspaper of Sorts. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe